I was going through my drafts folder, and came across a post I’d written way back in 2018. I’m not sure what site I was browsing at the time, but it was still a fun observation. If I came across this error in a more modern context, I’d assume site owners are placing limits to deal with the onslaught of gen-“AI” DDoS attacks. ☕︎ ☕︎ ☕︎ I was browsing an online store, like a gentleman, when I saw a message that sent me back to the Web 1.0 days: Due to an above average ...

UAE cabinet meeting room, via Camski . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. This week we look at aluminum disruptions, the EV rust belt, the ongoing transformer shortage, SpaceX’s IPO, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber.  War in Iran The world’s largest aluminum smelter in Bahrain was hit by an Iranian drone, bringing production o...

Welcome back to compiler land. Today we’re going to talk about value numbering , which is like SSA, but more. Static single assignment (SSA) gives names to values: every expression has a name, and each name corresponds to exactly one expression. It transforms programs like this: x = 0 x = x + 1 x = x + 1 where the variable x is assigned more than once in the program text, into programs like this: v0 = 0 v1 = v0 + 1 v2 = v1 + 1 ...

AI Assisted/Agentic programming are pretty common place at this point. The growing sentiment seems to be that if you can't find some sort of benefit in your workflow, it's more of a skill issue than a problem with the tools. Whether you believe this to be true is really up to you, what is clear is that it's becoming more of an expectation than an option for many engineers. I think AI/Agent tools come with a lot of gains however those don't come for free. Agent led development comes with (incr...

If I’ve been quiet on this blog for a while, it’s because I’ve been filling my hours with a lot of RPG design: D&D, A5E, Pathfinder, and, increasingly, Draw Steel (I’ve been doing freelance work on the game back from when it was MCDM RPG). And now it’s official! I’m starting a job as Draw Steel line developer at MCDM. I’m incredibly proud that this amazing company is letting me play with their toys. I have tons and tons of praise for MCDM that I basically can’t say now, becau...

I was a guest on Lenny Rachitsky's podcast, in a new episode titled An AI state of the union: We've passed the inflection point, dark factories are coming, and automation timelines . It's available on YouTube , Spotify , and Apple Podcasts . Here are my highlights from our conversation, with relevant links. The November inflection point Software engineers as bellwethers for other information workers Writing code on my phone Responsible vibe coding Dark Factories and ...

Just testing Just testing Just testing

Happy April 1st! This post is part of April Cools Club : an April 1st effort to publish genuine essays on unexpected topics. Please enjoy this true story, and rest assured that the tech content will be back soon! One Friday night a few months ago, my family and I sat down to relax and enjoy a TV show on our streaming platform of choice. The subscription was a perk of one of our credit cards, and we had been satisfied customers for several months. This time was different. Instead of a "Conti...

art002e000192 Hello, World , Image Credit: NASA/Reid Wiseman You may already have seen the above photo taken by Reid Wiseman on the Artemis II moon mission. For some of you it may conjure memories of another photo, The Blue Marble , taken by Harrison Schmitt during the Apollo 17 mission in 1972: AS17-148-22727 The Blue Marble , retouched by Wikipedia user Yann I’ve known that photo my whole life, but seeing it again last night sparked a curiosity about the other photos t...

Gimkit Snowy Survival is an infection-style 2D game mode where one player starts as The Cursed and hunts everyone else with a Snowball Launcher. Regular players run, farm resources, and dodge attacks. When a player’s health drops to zero, they join the cursed side. The match ends when all players are cursed or the host stops it. How Does Gimkit Snowy Survival Mode Work? Each match opens with a 20-second grace period. After that, one or more players become The Cursed and spawn with Sno...

My warm breath steams up my glasses a little bit. I have my cold pillow resting on my chin. I’m still under the covers. I started my morning with a book, Hot Chocolate on Thursday , a cosy tale that took me to Japan and Sydney all without my leaving my bedroom. I love reading in the mornings, although of late I have been a bit too busy to read so early. Saturday mornings, however, are always there for reading. The prospect of staying warm under the covers for a while longer was enticing – a...

Some 30 years ago, the mathematician Peter Shor took a niche physics project — the dream of building a computer based on the counterintuitive rules of quantum mechanics — and shook the world. Shor worked out a way for quantum computers to swiftly solve a couple of math problems that classical computers could complete only after many billions of years. Those two math problems happened to be the… Source Some 30 years ago, the mathematician Peter Shor took a niche physics project — the d...

Nicholas Carlini , a research scientist at Anthropic, reported at the [un]prompted AI security conference that he used Claude Code to find multiple remotely exploitable security vulnerabilities in the Linux kernel, including one that sat undiscovered for 23 years. Nicholas was astonished at how effective Claude Code has been at finding these bugs: We now have a number of remotely exploitable heap buffer overflows in the Linux kernel. I have never found one of these in my life before....

As we see LLMs churn out scads of code, folks have increasingly turned to Cognitive Debt as a metaphor for capturing how a team can lose understanding of what a system does. Margaret-Anne Storey thinks a good way of thinking about these problems is to consider three layers of system health : Technical debt lives in code. It accumulates when implementation decisions compromise future changeability. It limits how systems can change. Cognitive debt lives in people. It accumulate...

tl;dr; I cut 3.2 GB of memory usage from our Python web apps using five techniques: async workers, import isolation, the Raw+DC database pattern, local imports for heavy libraries, and disk-based caching. Here are the exact before-and-after numbers for each optimization. Over the past few weeks, I’ve been ruthlessly focused on reducing memory usage on my web apps, APIs, and daemons. I’ve been following the one big server pattern for deploying all the Talk Python web apps, APIs, backgr...

I blogged about Pope Leo XIV  here . Pope Leo XIV has an undergraduate degree in mathematics. He saw my post and asked for my help with his latest encyclical.  LEO: Let's have lunch together at Popeyes. BILL: Why Popeyes? LEO: The name is Pope-yes so I get a discount. BILL: Your treat. [We met at Pope-yes and had the following discussion.] LEO: I am working on an encyclical to resolve the tension between miracles in the Bible and modern science.  BILL: What's the issue? LEO: The Bible has mir...

Sanjay asked me in a comment on my AMA post : Dear Kev, I am a fellow reader of multiple blogs of yours and others. But somehow I have been searching for any article where any one can setup of his entire digital life using subscription free model. I am not talking about to get everything FREE and become a PRODUCT. If you think you can setup everything using opensource then how would you setup all of your essentials. You can write a post anytime when you have a time. F...

Original in Hindustani , followed by its English translation (though not as lyrical): Antariksh ki pyaas Woh bachpan ki kitaabe jisne dikhaye sitaare aaj bhi yaad se nihaare Durbin ki drishti me jagmag falak aur yaano ki gati se graho ki jalak Kalpana se Chaand par chalna aur brahmand ke brahman me dubna Aise lafzon se janmi thi antariksh ki pyaas Jiski mitin nahi aaj bhi aas Ek pal socho toh sahi Ki ek pustakalay ne likhi mere zindagibhar ki likhayi The thirst for space Those books from childh...

About five months ago I wrote about Absurd , a durable execution system we built for our own use at Earendil, sitting entirely on top of Postgres and Postgres alone. The pitch was simple: you don’t need a separate service , a compiler plugin , or an entire runtime to get durable workflows. You need a SQL file and a thin SDK. Since then we’ve been running it in production, and I figured it’s worth sharing what the experience has been like. The short version: the design held up, ...

Last year my aunt let me add her original Tangerine iBook G3 clamshell to my collection of old Macs 1 . It came with an AirPort card—a $99 add-on Apple made that ushered in the Wi-Fi era. The iBook G3 was the first consumer laptop with built-in Wi-Fi antennas, and by far the cheapest way to get a computer onto an 802.11 wireless network. Last year my aunt let me add her original Tangerine iBook G3 clamshell to my collection of old Macs 1 . It came with an AirPort card—...

Back in 1985, computer scientist Peter Naur wrote “Programming as Theory Building” . According to Naur - and I agree with him - the core output of software engineers is not the program itself, but the theory of how the program works . In other words, the knowledge inside the engineer’s mind is the primary artifact of engineering work, and the actual software is merely a by-product of that. This sounds weird, but it’s surprisingly intuitive. Every working programmer knows that you can...

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Anthony Nelzin-Santos, whose blog can be found at z1nz0l1n.com . Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter . People and Blogs is supported by the "One a Month" club members. If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one for as little as 1 dollar a month. Let’s start from the basics: can you introduce yourself? Bonjour ! I’m a militant wayfarer,...

A couple of weeks ago we took a little break. The first adults-only break since my daughter was born. For that reason, we decided to do something that was quite close to home. I am still was quite nervous about being far away from her and I didn’t want to go abroad because of her seizures. So I figured that we should stay near London and a small train journey away. Ideally, a train journey that wouldn’t be too expensive and that we could go on the day without price difference. Since we’re ...